Friday, August 3, 2018

So, why is Somaliland Africa's most successful non-country?

- When I told a friend recently that I was going to Hargeisa, he
looked at me in a way that told me immediately that he had no clue what I
was talking about. He eventually asked: “Where is that?”

Many
asked me this same question in 2014 when I first went to Hargeisa.

So
in many ways, here in East Africa, as elsewhere in the world, I suppose,
Hargeisa remains an unknown quantity nearly 30 years since Somaliland,
the country whose capital city it is, broke away from the rest of
Somalia and declared itself independent.

There must be
many reasons for this. The principal one, however, is that, even as
Somalilanders are fiercely emphatic that theirs is an independent
country, the rest of the world insists on not recognising the territory
as such.

Funny; isn’t it? Millions of people living in a
defined territory, with a keen sense of their own history as a state,
see themselves as a country.

The territory has a
government that is popularly elected in the kind of competitive
multiparty elections that are so loved by the “international community”
of democracy enthusiasts and advocates, and are used as a yardstick for
judging whether governments are legitimate or not.

Somaliland
even has passports that its citizens use to travel to many parts of the
world, except to the territory that still calls itself Somalia. Some of
the world’s better-known airlines fly there on a regular basis.

A
number of UN agencies have offices there, not to provide emergency aid
as they do in many places in the world, thanks to dysfunctional
governments in most cases, but to support local efforts in pursuit of
development and wellbeing.

Unknown to many, including
those that use it on a regular basis across the world, the money
transfer and banking giant Dahabshil that gives older competitors a good
run for their money, is headquartered there, having been founded by a
Somalilander.

Somaliland also has a vibrant private
sector driven by the culture of enterprise for which Somali-speaking
peoples here in East Africa and elsewhere are well known. Yet we, the
rest of the world, insist on denying it recognition as a sovereign
country.

There must be a whole range of reasons why
sovereign countries that are recognised as such in the international
community have withheld recognition. These things are never simple and
straightforward.

Still, the complexity behind whatever
reasons the world uses to justify its stance of non-recognition does
nothing to diminish the feeling visitors get, that they are indeed in a
country.

For one thing, assessed alongside some of its
recognised peers on the continent in such things as political stability
and safety, it puts them to shame.

The UN and other
actors rate Hargeisa as safer than many capital cities in Africa and
beyond. Funnily enough, when I revealed to the friend I was talking to
that Hargeisa was in Somaliland, he heard “Somalia.”

Immediately
he asked if I wasn’t afraid of Al Shabaab, the jihadists mainly
responsible for Somalia’s reputation as a dangerous place.

He
wouldn’t buy the argument that there is anywhere in “Somalia” that is
safe from the Islamist militia. And yet when you arrive in Somaliland
and ask the local people about Al Shabaab, the response you get tends to
be, “They dare not come here.”

Conversations about Al
Shabaab help one to understand the connection between the drive to
ensure security and Somaliland’s pursuit of recognition as an
independent state.

Few things establish the legitimacy
of a government in the minds of the people it leads better than the
ability to ensure security across its entire territory.

Which
takes me to why I went to Hargeisa recently as did dozens of other
visitors with whom I spent most of my time there. Each year, this
capital of a non-recognised country organises one of the most popular
book fairs in Africa.

But in many ways the Hargeisa
International Book Fair is far more than simply about books. It is about
Somalilanders showcasing their country, its rich culture, the political
stability and freedoms they enjoy, the vibrant commercial life, and
affirming the de facto status of their country as a an independent
state.

Probably nothing would do it better than a
cultural event on such a scale. And few things strike one immediately
more than the fact that, late in the evening when in most cities across
the world commercial activity would have come to a stop, in Hargeisa
people are still out on the street, the shops open and trading.

Each
year the book fair hosts a guest country. This year it was my other
country, Rwanda, to which a special panel was dedicated.

Many
Somalilanders see Rwanda as their country’s role model and are
therefore keen to learn as much as they can about how it has managed to
achieve so much in such a short time. Rwanda and Somaliland share some
attributes. For me, the hunger for success is the most striking.